


Differing Perspectives

by Pandomy



Category: Original Work
Genre: Contest Entry, F/M, Fantasy Violence, Other, Outer Space, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:08:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27093310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pandomy/pseuds/Pandomy
Summary: "A genre savvy crew assemble for a mission. The problem? They all think they're in a different genre."Entry for the 2020 /r/rational Secret Krampus writing contest. Significant liberties were taken with the prompt.
Kudos: 18





	Differing Perspectives

The captain of the STS Infinium, Alan Vaughn, sighed in contentment as he watched the explosions of light through the viewing displays of the bridge, the radiance of the stars warping beautifully as the FTL bubble formed around his ship. The knowledge that it was a mere projection, transmitted through the layers of the hull, didn't diminish it a single iota. Never in a hundred missions had that sight gotten old, and this one was shaping up to be no exception.

He turned past the monitors lining the room, to his gathered crew, as he felt the soft vibrations that told of the thrusters gradually winding up, a grin on his face. This part never got old either.

"And so we are on our way. On a mission to explore the great unknown, to expand the breadth of known space, and to welcome any and all civilizations we find into the intergalactic community." Alan had realised quite early in his career the importance of building relationships with his crewmembers, and made sure to make eye contact with each as he continued.

"I know we've all been getting barraged with briefings and speeches for days now, so I'll try to keep this short," he said as he met the eyes of his navigational officer, a tall, athletic woman with a fierce gaze and that strange agelessness unique to those who'd already been old when the cure to aging was developed.

"Even if it seems routine, the work we're doing here is  _ absolutely vital. _ Every system we hit with short-range scans reveals new resources that allow the Alliance to grow. Every civilization we find and uplift shortcuts  _ untold millennia _ of war and suffering." His gaze moved leftward to his engineer, a mousy boy who didn't look a day out of the academy, but who nevertheless had a glint of determination in his eye.

"Each of our roles is  _ crucial, _ and it will take each one of us to see this mission through to the end." He moved on to his observation officer, a slight young woman who he knew was even younger than the engineer, on some kind of work experience program. Even if he hadn't been briefed, though, he would've been able to tell that this was her first spaceflight from the way her eyes had stayed locked on the dancing lights of the viewing display behind him throughout his entire speech.

Alan's grin crooked as he prepared to wrap up. "Well, maybe not  _ that _ crucial. Even if we all die in a fiery explosion, the AI will probably continue on without us." This was, of course, a joke. The artificial system of the ship was already managing everything it was legally capable of. The organic crew was for what was left. He was lightly chuckling at his own quip when his gaze fell onto the last member of his crew, and he had to suppress a flinch.

He hadn't...  _ forgotten _ that there was an alien on his crew. He just, well, wasn't used to it. The boys (and girls, and others) upstairs usually kept crews relatively homogenous, species-wise, and even in the handful of missions he'd been on that included non-humans, they were almost always human _ oid. _ Human, but with different colour skin or weird neck frills. It was better for social cohesion, that way. He could count the number of truly  _ alien _ aliens he'd captained on one hand (and still have three fingers left over).

His internal logistics officer was one of those alien aliens. It's carapace-covered bulk stood slightly shorter than his engineer, but nearly as wide as it was tall. The dark teal of its armour plates shimmered slightly as it moved, like oil. Alan spent a moment studying what he thought was its head, trying to find an eye to meet, but quickly gave it up as a bad job, and moved on.

He returned his gaze to the wider room, and gave his crew his most confident beaming smile. "You all know your jobs. I'll see you in the mess for lunch. Dismissed." The crewmembers whose workstations lay elsewhere on the ship quickly filtered out, leaving the room to just him and his navigational officer.

His face dimmed a little as he walked over and slid into the captain's chair, facing the array of monitors and various instruments of the bridge, only a fraction of which he had any idea to the function of. He sighed, and prepared himself for, by all indications, at least a week before anything interesting happened.

This part... this part had gotten old inside of a week on his first mission.

"Captain Vaughn," his navigational officer acknowledged as she took her seat next to him, obviously much more familiar with whatever the panels before them conveyed, by the way her eyes distinctively did  _ not _ glaze over the second she looked at them.

"Officer-" Alan started. Ah, hell.  _ Names. _ Names had always eluded him, no matter how many times he read their file. What was hers? He couldn't remember a single scrap about her last name, but he was pretty sure her first name started with an A. Adelaide? Abigail? Aveline? Wait, no, it started with an  _ E, _ and it was- "-Evelyn," he finished.  _ Nailed it. _

She quirked an eyebrow in his direction, perhaps detecting the pause, or perhaps at the fact that he'd just used her first name with her title, like an absolute fool, but either way she seemed to shrug it off. "Good speech. I'm sure it'll be a pleasure to work with you," she said.

Well, that was promising. "And you as well," Alan replied. With that, he settled in, silently praying for something,  _ anything _ to draw him from his captainly duties of paperwork and essentially watching paint dry.

* * *

The navigational officer of the STS Infinium, Evelyn Sharp, groaned as she slammed into the wall of the bridge. Or, more accurately, as the wall of the bridge slammed into her, the ship listing nauseatingly as it skirted the edge of a comet big enough to shatter the Infinium without so much as a by your leave. She was going to  _ kill _ that man.

They'd barely gotten a week into their journey when the navigational readings had brought to her attention that their current path would take them through the heart of a starstorm. This hadn't been any major problem; Evelyn had drawn up a new route that took them around the storm and rejoined their original path on the other side, barely a week out of their way. Just some normal, routine rerouting.

The trouble had come when she'd brought the plan to Captain Vaughn for approval. He  _ should _ have barely given it a glance before signing off. She'd made plans like this a thousand times, and her captains had  _ always _ signed off on them with barely a glance. But no, with  _ this man, _ things could never be that simple. The second he'd heard the word 'starstorm', the melancholic boredom he'd been wearing all week wiped away, replaced with a manic grin.

"Captain, the new route is already programmed into the ship, it's just awaiting your approval," she'd urged, desperately hoping the suspicion creeping up her neck was wrong.

"Nonsense! No one ever got hurt by a little ion radiation," he'd replied, which was  _ blatantly false. _ "Our work is too important to be delayed! Don't worry, I'll guide us through," he continued, rising from his current seat and moving over to the pilot's chair, usually kept empty until manual piloting was required.

She'd paled at that. "Sir, please, there's no need for that. It's not a significant delay, and sir, it's a  _ starstorm, _ " she'd pleaded. "Barely a fifth of ships that go through one come out the other side intact." The words had barely left her mouth when she'd realised that that was exactly the wrong thing to say, by how his head had snapped towards her and his grin, somehow, had gotten  _ even wider. _

"Never tell me the odds!"

And that was how, a scant hour later, Evelyn found herself doing her best impression of a pinball bouncing around the bridge, while the captain  _ roared _ with laughter as he spun the ship in ridiculous maneuvers, his own body kept stationary by a seat belt.

_ Her _ seat had a seat belt as well, but she hadn't thought to use it before the ship started going out from under her, because she'd literally never _ had  _ to before. For God's sake, the man had all but disabled the ship's inertial clamps! For 'better handling' he'd said. As soon as they got out of this, assuming she still had all of her limbs by then,  _ she was going to kill that man. _

Evelyn had been among the first generation for whom spaceflight was a real career one could attain and spend their life on, not just an occasional sojourn for highly-ranked military brats. She'd spent two-thirds of her life up to now fighting in the Greatest War, between the Universal Alliance and the now-defunct Alloran Empire, only resolved a few scant decades ago in a battle that'd spanned solar systems and seen stars swallowed whole to fuel their terrible weaponry. She herself had flown missions far more turbulent and with worse chances than what Captain Vaughn was doing now.

But never in her centuries had she seen a captain take such a huge risk for such a stupid reason.

Another jerk of this ship wrenched her from her thoughts, accompanied by the muted  _ whir _ of the door to the bridge sliding open, their beanpole of an engineer stumbling into the room, quickly followed by the  _ fucking alien. _

Evelyn did not like aliens. Evelyn  _ especially _ did not like aliens which served as the Allorans' foot soldiers in the handful of personnel-based battles she'd fought in. And Evelyn  _ most assuredly _ did not like such an alien being their fucking  _ human resources, _ on top of scheduling everything from meals to breaks to sleeping times for the whole fucking crew. She'd tried trusting aliens before, and every single time it'd turned out the exact same:  _ badly. _

Between it and the captain's apparent disregard for life and limb, she was beginning to regret taking a working retirement. The engineer dove for a corner of the bridge, while the alien held itself in the doorway. Good. If that thing crashed into her, she would  _ not _ be held responsible for her actions ( _ God _ , it literally looked like a fucking  _ xenomorph, _ just less sinewy lion and more dumb boulder).

The boy (Nat-something?) had apparently found something to hold onto, as he was being thrown this way and that with the rocking of the ship, but managed to stay on one side. He wasn't speaking up, so the alien apparently took it upon itself to ask in its painfully gravelly voice, "What is happening?" because it wasn't as if the captain had actually taken the time to  _ warn _ their other crewmembers about what he was doing.

"Nothing to worry about!" came the captain's reply as he juked the ship and once again sent her crashing into a wall. "We're almost out of it! Just a few more-" and then he did a sickening barrel roll straight through a cluster of asteroids that there was  _ no reason _ not to go around. "-aaaand we're through," he finished, laying back in his seat.

Evelyn lay still for a moment, breathing heavily, giving her nanomachines time to heal the many,  _ many _ bruises she'd just received. In the sudden stillness, the alien gave something akin to a nod before retreating out the door. The engineer kept having some kind of fit in the corner, and she worried for a moment if he was having a seizure. She'd barely finished the thought, though, as he finally stilled, drawing himself up against the wall with a grimace. He was probably fine.

Evelyn found the breath to stand up with him, and shot a dirty look over at their captain. "Was that  _ truly _ necessary?" she implored him.

He spun his chair to face them, lips quirking. "Of course it was, Evelyn. I've got to keep my skills sharp. What was that fraction you said, of ships that have made it through a starstorm? A fifth?" She nodded. "I've flown a lot of missions, love. I've done this before. That fifth that made it through? Ninety-percent of them were  _ mine." _ And Evelyn immediately lost the breath she'd just regained, because  _ goddamnit, _ that cool, confident grin was one of the most attractive things she'd ever seen.

* * *

The engineer of the STS Infinium, Nathaniel Donnelly, hummed to himself as he picked through his breakfast. The mess hall, if it could be called that, was more populated this morning than usual. As the mission went on, the sleep times of the crew were staggered, so that at least two of them were always awake, to rouse the rest in an emergency.

His breakfast time was occasionally someone else's dinner. At the moment, he was sharing the table with Captain 'call-me-Alan' Vaughn, who usually skipped whatever meal he had now, and Katelyn, the one he shared an engineering office and most of his waking time with. The captain was going off on some inane story, while she gave an occasional snort in acknowledgement.

Naive fools, the both of them along with everyone else on the ship, ignorant of the true dangers he fought every day to protect them from, the things that would gladly hollow out their minds, and munch on their bodies as dessert.

He hadn't really believed it, at first, when he'd joined the Space Transport Maintenance Corps, when they'd told him of the Corps' true purpose, of why it was legally mandated to have an engineering position on every mission into space, no matter the fact that those duties could be safely left to AIs. Of the ancient evils the first intelligent species to leave the safety of their star had encountered, evils which could find any who so much as spoke of them.

And so Nathaniel found himself in the unenviable position of fighting off the invisible fragments of those great beings which managed to slip into the ship, and on occasion troubleshooting makework maintenance issues that the ship was perfectly capable of taking care of itself, for appearances'.

He huffed in disgust and rose from his seat, dumping his half-eaten meal through the recycler, off to get decomposed, stored, and eventually get recomposed into whatever those on the ship needed. Nathaniel preferred not to think about it, but he knew the washrooms did the very same.

As he left the mess hall, intent on starting his day, he heard a "Wait up!" called out behind him. He did not wait, but he did slow somewhat to allow Katelyn to catch up. "You always leave so suddenly!" she chastised, bumping him in the arm. "You know, Nate, we always go to the same place, so you might as well wait so we can walk together." This was something she'd remarked on several times in the month and change since they'd found themselves crewmates. Why she continued when Nathaniel had made a point of ignoring it, he had no idea.

Barring that argument, Nathaniel found Katelyn… tolerable. At least when she wasn't winding up for a lecture. She was a bit overly-chatty, sure, but it wasn't that bad. It wasn't like either of them had anyone else to talk to, squirrelled away in the engineering office in the far corner of the ship all day.

There  _ was _ something odd about her, though. Something  _ off. _ He'd spent hours staring at her around the beginning of the mission, trying to figure out what, to the point that she'd noticed and started teasing him about it. He still couldn't put his finger on it.

"Or, I could not waste my time, and simply get on with my duties, Katelyn," he replied.

"Ooor, you could wait, because it's not like we won't just be sitting there for hours. It doesn't make a difference whether we're sitting in the mess hall or the engineering room! And call me  _ Katie." _

"Hmm."

She gave a sigh at his non-concession, but soon recovered her normal disposition and chattered the rest of the way towards their destination. They arrived shortly and settled into their seats on opposite sides of the room. He pulled out a tablet, loaded with books that had kept him sane in the long lulls between violent action. He knew Katelyn had something similar.

He glanced back at the ceiling-high panels of instruments and displays she sat before, presenting diagnostic information from all over the ship. Most served an entirely mundane purpose, gauging actual processes on the ship, but he'd modified a select few to alert him whenever a fragment of the outer beings found its way into the ship, allowing him to leave to dispatch it. He always kept an eye on them when he was in the office. Katelyn, though she didn't know it, was a second pair of eyes to keep track of them when he was out, whether sleeping or performing actual maintenance on the ship. They never went more than ten minutes unobserved.

Ten apparently crucial minutes. A moment after seating herself, Katelyn piped up that "I think there's something off with the…" she paused as she tried to figure out what that particular display kept track of "...air vent temperature sensor. See?"

He walked over to see that she was right. A small circular scale, buried in the middle of the panel amongst everything else and completely unremarkable, had its indicator turned far past the point that all of them would be frozen to death by now. One of the more subtle indicators of a fragment breach, which he had apparently missed when he first sat down.  _ Shit. _ Well, that was why there were two of them.

"Weird. I'll go see what the problem is," he answered smoothly, not showing a hint of the adrenaline he could feel starting to surge. He grabbed the bag from his workstation, containing the short-range sensor he'd need to use to track down the fragment. It was when he turned to leave that he saw it, an abomination of thorns and chitin twitching its way out from behind a stack of boxes.

_ Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit. _ "Oookay," Katelyn replied to him, still focused on the odd reading and completely oblivious to the danger.

He had to think quickly. "Ah, actually, I think I forgot my tablet in the mess hall. Could you go grab it?" She was in danger here. He had to get her to leave, before the fragment got over whatever curiosity had it studying them.

She, of course, snorted, probably rolling her eyes at him. "Go get it yourself, lazy. I'm not your maid."

_ Come on. _ "Please? I have something I need to finish up here. I'll owe you a favor?"  _ Just do it already! _

She turned around in her seat, shooting him a confused look, then following his gaze to where it was still locked. Which was fine, it didn't matter. She was uninitiated, had never gone through the ritual to allow her mind to pierce whatever strange effect hid the outer beings and their fragments, whatever made a normal person's mind gloss over anything to do with them. All she could see was empty spa- "What the fuck is that!?"

Nathaniel's head snapped around to her, and all he managed to get out was "You can-" before it lunged for her. Awareness, acknowledgement, reaction, these were what drew the beings' attention; the Corps only ever discussed them on-planet, within a star's safe radius. She'd just doomed herself.

He lunged in kind, but even as he did he knew he wouldn't make it in time. Almost in slow-motion, he saw it reach her, saw it tear into the arm she'd brought up to protect herself.

Saw that same arm explode into a giant purple-green giant tentacle bigger than his entire body and slam the fragment into the wall with a meaty  _ thump, _ then just as quickly retract into unblemished human flesh, leaving no evidence bar the torn edges of her uniform sleeve.

Nathaniel barely noticed the beast dissolve into light, as they all did when they died. He lay on the floor where he'd fallen short in his failed lunge, face a picture of shock, the same expression mirrored on his crewmate.

The silence was broken by a high-pitched whistle coming from the diagnostic panels, one of the less subtle indicators of a fragment breach.

* * *

The observation officer of the STS Infinium, Katelyn Busser, considered her life up to this point. The vast majority of it had been awfully, achingly,  _ aggressively _ dull. From her earliest memories in the foster home right up to her latest year in the Astronautic Academy back on Earth, everything was so unrelentingly safe, sanitary,  _ boring. _

The one thing that kept her going, kept her focused through taking academy classes that she could have  _ taught _ (in her _sleep!_ ) yet wasn't allowed to test out of, was her dream of flying through the stars, discovering places no intelligent species had ever gone, exploring the uncharted infinity! She'd known that in only a few short years, she'd be able to ride up the space elevator, get onto a spaceship, and leave her world behind.

And so, when an opportunity came to punch that ticket early, she'd jumped on it. 'Academy credit!' it'd said. 'Make connections and jumpstart your career!' it'd said. 'See the stars first-hand!' it'd said.

'Stare at a wall all day until your eyes bleed!' the internship posting very much had  _ not _ said.

Because that was how Katie had spent most of her waking hours since she'd stepped onto this giant hunk of metal and polymer. She'd gotten one glimpse ( _one!_ ) of the beauty of the stars rushing by outside during Alan's introductory speech on the bridge, had gotten to meet one ( _one!_ ) cool alien, and since then had been cooped up all day with a weird loner.

Well, okay, that was a bit harsh. Nate had his whole tall, dark, and gloomy attitude, but she was ninety-eight percent certain that that was just an act, and he'd be a big cuddly marshmallow inside if he ever let himself drop it. She  _ might _ have been a bit biased in that assessment by how cute he was, but whatever. Her point still stood.

So, Katie's job wasn't  _ all _ bad. She had Nate to talk to (even if he rarely talked back), she had textbooks to read, she had a rubber-band ball she occasionally bounced off the wall, half-hoping it'd break something important and give her something to do. She had four-hundred-odd readouts to occasionally pay attention to, letting Nate know when one of them fell out of their standard ranges once or twice a day so he could go off and do whatever he did to fix them.

And she apparently had a giant mutant tentacle for a right arm. That… was a thing.

She was snapped out of her staring at said thing, which had reverted to normal, by a nails-on-chalkboard  _ shrieking _ coming from her readout panel.

"What the  _ fuck _ was that!?" she screamed for the second time, her throat already going hoarse.

Nate looked at her, dazed. "A… fragment. But, how, what did you just  _ do?" _ She could barely hear him over whatever instrument was making that awful noise. It was probably important, but she had bigger things on her plate at the moment.

"A fragment of fucking  _ what? _ What the hell is hap-" she cut herself off as she saw out of the corner of her eye some kind of dark liquid bubbling high up through a seam between two of the plates which made up the wall. "And what the fucking fuck is  _ that? _ "

Nate dove at it, pulling something from his bag that Katie couldn't see, but too late, the viscous fluid surged out in a geyser over his head, straight at her and  _ oh damn it to the stars, _ it got in her  _ mouth, _ that was so fucking gross!

In a second the fluid pulled together and solidified into some kind of rabbit thing, but way less cute and way more bubbly and face-huggy. She desperately flailed at it as it tore at her face, trying to dislodge it, yanking and yanking but its grip was too strong, it wouldn't  _ move, _ until with a  _ squelch _ she felt the bones in her arm explode for the second time in as many minutes. Another tentacle, this one split into a dozen tendrils, ripped the creature apart and with a scream she splattered it against the wall with a fling.

Katie whirled on Nate, apparently kneeling in some kind of mini glowing dust-storm and with a wicked-looking knife with its tip embedded in the floor.  _ "WHAT ARE THESE THINGS?" _ she screamed for the  _ third _ time, and if there needed to be a fourth she was going to fucking slap him.

"I told you, they're fragments! They-" his eyes widened at something behind her, giving her just enough warning to turn and whip the death bunny out of the air with her tentacle arm, splattering it against the wall. Where it immediately started to reform.

She slammed her arm against it again. "Will-" it started to reform, she slammed it again. "-you-" Reform again, slam again." -just-" And again. "-fucking-" And again.  _ "-die!" _ Something shivered down her new appendage and whatever it was did  _ something. _ The creature gave one last attempt at forming before collapsing halfway through, dissolving into glowing dust.

And, just as it did, three more of the things squeezed themselves out of thin air, and then more and more and  _ more. _ Spikes and spurs and blood and bone and suckers and sinew and every one a new and unique flavour of horror. The edge of her tentacle turned sharp as she bisected the lot, each one dead replaced by three others.

"Katelyn, you've got to stop asking questions! Talking about them makes it worse!" he cried, dodging back and forth and trying to stay out of her way.

"I'll stop asking when you  _ answer _ them!"

"Fucking, fine! They're  _ monsters, _ monsters from space! Happy?"

"No! What the fuck did they do to me?" Even in the midst of fighting off waves of fucking  _ space monsters, _ Katie did her best to gesture to the tentacle sticking out of her shoulder, just in case he hadn't noticed.

That pulled him up short. "I- I don't know. I've never heard about anything like this before. It's like- I've only ever seen a  _ fragment _ morph like that, and- there's something weird about you, but you're a human! The sensors would have gone off the second you stepped on the ship, if you weren't!"

Katie froze, just for a second, before she continued the melee. That... changed things. She'd been a bit busy to devote all that much thought to it, but she'd kind of assumed that that first crea-  _ fragment _ had, like, infected her or something, given her some kind of plague that would turn her into one of them. But, apparently this wasn't normal, whatever 'normal' meant in this context.

An idea started to percolate in the back of her mind.  _ Holy shit. _ "Dude," she started. "Are you telling me-" The monsters were still relentless. She swept a big cluster of them away as they formed near Nate "-that I, Katelyn Elisabeth Busser-" She'd overextended herself; a new wave was coming from her left side, the one without the normal arm. She didn't have time to turn. She felt the tentacle split, but knew she couldn't get it there before they reached her.

So instead she took that feeling from her tentacle arm, the kind of perpetual explosion contained inside of a too-small bottle, and shoved that same feeling into her  _ left _ arm, the normal one. And with another explosion of fabric as her sleeve was torn apart, she found herself with a brand new monster tentacle arm, with which she smashed the leaping monsters out of the air. "-am part  _ mutant space monster!?" _

Nate stared (he seemed to be doing a lot of that), only just snapping out of it in time to dive out of the way of a thing with too many eyes. "I- I guess so?"

_ "Holy shit, _ dude, that is so fucking cool!" And then she was laughing, laughing and fighting and  _ revelling _ . She wasn't afraid anymore, but  _ gleeful, _ because this was most definitely the least boring thing to ever happen to her. She was part mutant space monster! That was, like, the next-coolest thing to being a magical girl!

Katie cackled like a madwoman through the next consecutive eleven minutes of monster smashing, until one by one the instruments on the diagnostic panel came to silence, stopped buzzing and flashing and spinning, until finally that stars-be-damned whistle went silent, until she whirled around to meet the next enemy, only to find nothing. She was alone, save for lots and lots of glowing dust, and Nate, still staring in shock.

"That. Was.  _ Awesome!" _ Katie shouted, not caring anymore how sore her throat was. "Are they done? Are there any more I can fight?" She turned her arms back to normal and re-tentacleified them, just because she could/

Nate looked around in disbelief, completely flabbergasted. "I don't know. Once a fragment attack gets to that point, they're not supposed to ever stop, not while-" his eyes widened, went back to staring at her. "Unless, you- you drew them all in and-" and then he muttered in a voice she could barely hear over the ringing in her ears, "...I think you've just depopulated this entire sector of space."

"That's impressive, right?" He gave a slow nod. "Woo! I am so fucking  _ badass! _ " Katie turned and shifted her arms to normal as she took a flying hug at her crewmate, laughing and grinning like a loon.

As the shock of the battle, of even still being alive, wore off, Nate started to focus back in on her, his eyes filled with wonder as he went off on a monologue in that cute way he did "I've read the records before, Katelyn.  _ No one _ has ever survived an attack like this; a few fragments at a time, sure, maybe even half a dozen but it always gets to be too much, too many angles to defend, too much time spent finishing off one just for another to shove a claw through your stomach. There were  _ hundreds _ of those things, maybe thousands, and you just brute-forced through  _ all _ of them. Holy shit, Katie."

Ah! "You called me Katie!" He laughed at that, laughed long and high. It was a nice laugh, one she realised she'd never heard before.

"You just saved my  _ life. _ I'll call you whatever the hell you want, Katie! I could fucking  _ kiss _ you right now."

"Then fucking do it, you coward!"

And he did.

* * *

The internal logistics officer of the STS Infinium, whose name was entirely unrepresentable in the script used by the rest of the crew,  _ squeed _ and wrapped their appendages around each other in glee as they watched the two humans mush their upper orifices together on the security screen.

Then they looked away, because honestly, that was pretty gross; they were pretty sure that those things connected to the digestive tract.  _ Stars, _ aliens were so  _ weird. _ Still, though, the logistics officer had done their research on the mating customs of these weird baby aliens, and they were pretty sure this was the human equivalent of the third ceremony of the fourth stage of the ritual of sacred matrimony. She wasn't  _ exactly _ sure how it had happened – stuff had gotten really confusing for a kilosecond or so just before – but it did!

Their squeeing continued unabated for another minute or so, and even once it tapered off they were filled with the warm glow of satisfaction of a puzzle properly solved. They  _ loved it _ when they finally found the right path, and humans were so  _ simple. _ It was nothing like back home.

They'd never been very good at navigating social situations, always just  _ barely _ missing the proper protocols, whether that was wearing the wrong day's ornamentation pattern, exiting a building with the wrong gait, speaking at the wrong resonance to respect their relative social status, or the thousand other ways they proved how much of a doofus they were.  _ Stars above, _ once they'd nearly walked into an interview with their dorsal plate an entire  _ six arcminutes _ off from its dictated rotation! They felt their subbrachial panoply desolidify in mortification.

With these aliens, though, the kind of misstep that would rightly have gotten them thrown out of polite society forever in her home civilization barely fazed them! They didn't even  _ care! _ Basically all she had to do was put them in proximity under the right conditions and they'd eventually mate, no matter how many times it'd failed badly before!

The logistics officer had been nervous when their superiors told them that their first mission was going to be an experiment with a bunch of aliens, managing their social relations of all things. A lot of that tension had eased when they'd seen how  _ cute _ humans were (they looked just like giant babies, right before their carapace started to come in! It was so freaking _adorable!!!_ ), and finally dissipated entirely when they'd realised that human customs really were as primitive as their superiors had told them.

They took a moment to glance at the only display of their array that was currently blank, off to the side. They tapped it, to check if it was safe to look yet, but- nope! Nope nope nope, they turned it back off.  _ Ugh. _ The other pair of aliens, the ones they the logistics officer had paired together first, were still doing the gross things in the leader's sleeping chamber, as they had been almost whenever their scheduled free time overlapped. The logistics officer knew that that was good, sure, that it was an important stage in their mating rituals, but it was still so  _ gross. Aliens. _

The logistics officer glanced back at their other display to see that the new couple was now moving down the hallway on another screen, their upper orifices disengaged, but the instruments at the ends of their upper limbs now intertwined.  _ Awww! _ That was  _ much _ more wholesome!

The logistics officer quietly chuffed to themself, then leaned forward, a new gleam in their photoreceptic membrane. They knew they couldn't just rest on their laurels; there was plenty of mission left, and their work was not yet done. While there were six possible pairings between any four individuals, they'd only managed  _ two _ alien couples so far.

Mark their words; before the mission was done, the logistics officer was going to see to it that they got all six. They always had been something of a completionist.


End file.
